


Can't Carry It With You

by chaila



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-14
Updated: 2010-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-11 13:03:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaila/pseuds/chaila
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would be far more efficient to leave all this behind. Sarah, James and Savannah, post series finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Carry It With You

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://chaila43.livejournal.com/75409.html) on LJ.

Every day for the first two months John is gone, Sarah thinks about taking Savannah and disappearing.  The idea is exhausting but it’s the logical thing to do.  Even if she were not a dead fugitive, they are conspicuous, the three of them together, and Ellison is still an unknown quantity.

She weighs him, considering his usefulness against his demands.  He is helpful to her at the helm of ZeiraCorp and it’s a relief to have an ally who can freely walk the streets.  In return he wants more than it suits her to give, and that’s familiar enough, but the implicit price of his allegiance is the answers he thinks she has, the truths he’s convinced she will reveal to him.  The weight of this belief is heavy and in time she fears it will be crushing.  It would be far more efficient to leave all this behind. 

So she plots and plans, traces routes, acquires papers and invents new names.  His wariness of her lessens as the weeks pass.  She packs one bag and feels no guilt.  Agent James Ellison dragged himself into this.  He won’t let go easily but he knows the stakes.  If he tries to follow, he will do it alone.  She will have the head start provided by long years of practice and the investigator’s demeanor he can never quite shake will make it difficult for him to navigate the shadows she intends to fade into.  She’s not even certain he’ll try to find them.  She recognizes the eyes of a man who doesn’t have much left to give—another skill honed by practice—and one more shift of what he thinks he knows might be enough to break him. 

This is not what stops her from going. 

The girl already belongs to James in a way she always thought John might have belonged to his father or to Charley, given the chance.  It’s apparent that he’s not a father, but he takes on the new role as calmly and as intently as he does everything else.  He is bad with braids and baths and clothes and good with breakfast and schedules and bedtime.  It’s James who reads her fairy tales and Bible stories before he tucks her in; it’s to him she looks for comfort when the nightmares come; and it’s he who reassures her in carefully chosen words that are never quite lies.  Sarah is as vigilant about Savannah’s safety as she was about John’s, but every time a child wakes screaming in terror and calling for someone else, she releases a little bit more of the breath she’s been holding for as long she can remember. 

Eight weeks and three days after John, she unpacks the bag and, for a moment, lets herself think of fresh air.


End file.
